June 11, 2004
D & B Railroad was created in the fall of 1995 in my parent's back yard. The D & B stands for Dennis and Bud's Garden Railroad. My father the year before had completed a pond with a small running stream and a stream that had been laid out but not finished. This became the vision and the challenge for building a garden railroad, as it had to find a way around and through hills and streams. It has slowly but continually grown over the years. It started out as a small point to loop then a larger point to loop until I had gotten the track around the pond, streams and hills back to the loop end. After several years I had an odd shaped figure 8. At this point I started looking for a multi train control system to control several engines at the same time. After lots of research I choose to use DCC for train control. It was a tethered controller from Digitrax. As the town continued to grow it became evident that this location was not big enough for the town. So a new location had to be found.

In March of 1998 the location was found, built up and the massive process of moving buildings and their residents was undertaken. The relocation of the town meant that there also had to be track for passenger service to this new area thus the creation of the Junction City loop and a 30-foot (720 scale feet) of trestle. After the successful move the location of the old town was converted into a small rail yard. At this point they had started selling wireless controllers. This made operation great, with 2 controllers my father and I were be able to run 4 trains at the same time. It was great to see all the trains running around the yard until someone would ask one of us a question and soon there would be a large noise of trains crashing in to each other, head on crashes and rear end crashes, Lots of fun.

In 1999 was the addition of a mining operation, a mountain, mineshaft, stamp mill, some scale track for the miners to push the ore cars for the shaft to the mill and a small stone building and the relocation / addition of some track.

In the summer of 2000 I got laid off of from my job with a significant severance package and after a little travel took the year off to work on the railroad and rejuvenate myself. It was time for another addition, a logging operation. This required a new larger mountain more track, lots of trees and 2 donkey engines and all the cabling for a logging operation. The track that was needed included 2 switchbacks to get to the top of the mountain and since the logging company was using a Climax the average grade for the 2 switchbacks wound up being around 8%. The climax with a load of logs moves up and down the mountain with great ease. In the fall of 2000 my father and I built a workshop / storage in the back yard. The rest of my remaining time off was running trains and yard work and in Sept. 2001 back to work 8 to 5. That fall I joined the great